Upcoming Meeting June 4, 2013

Hi everyone,

Our next meeting will be Tuesday June 4, (Yes I know I said June 6 in my email, but it is close enough to still have a D-Day theme :) ) This will be the 69th anniversary of that day and will prepare us for an even better 70th next year. As a persepctive, the youngest D-Day veterans are all at least 87/88 years old now, those that are left.

I pass along to you some comments by Steve F. as a retrospective of D-Day - from a Canadian perspective..

Re a DVD of "The Longest Day", I don't have that one, but I do have a copy of "Storming Juno" which is an account of the Canadian landings in Normandy. It might be as well to bring that forward as our participation has often been overlooked by our Allies. The Americans lump us in with the British and the latter seem quite content with that as we were under overall British command both in Italy and in Northwest Europe. Also If you believe the view presented in "The Longest Day" and other American films that deal with the events, Normandy was Omaha Beach. 

Several things should be noted at this point:

1.About 156000 men were landed on D-Day

2. Of these 73000 were American

3. 83000 were British

4. Of the British Total, 21300 were Canadian

For those with a mathematical bent, you will notice the Canadian commitment was almost 1/3 of the American, even though this country had and has only 1/10 th the  population. Further Canada suffered more casualties on D-Day than any other Allied units except the Americans at Omaha. They were 2 hours late getting ashore because Juno was the most difficult of all the landings. This was due to the presence  of offshore reefs which meant that our landing craft had to wait until the tide had risen high enough for them to clear the reefs. This was known before the beach was assaulted but its location was critical to the success of the landings. This meant that our guys were entering combat against a fully alerted enemy in a battle already 2 hours old. For all of that, our units advanced further inland than any other Allied units on D-Day and came the closest to achieving their assigned objectives. This is known as punching above your weight, which militarily, has been something of a Canadian specialty over the years. 

This is not intended to belittle the American contribution, a lot went wrong for the guys on Omaha that day. Due to vile weather and tricky currents they missed the beach they were supposed to hit and landed where no preliminary bombardment or demolition had taken place. For all of that, they prevailed taking more casualties than all other Allied  units combined.

Re: Models, I hope someone has a 1/35  Tiger or Panther to show, as those were the one most commonly encountered by our troops in the first counter attacks and in the run up to the breakout from Juno. Just finished a book titled "Breakout from Juno" by Mark Zuelke in which he recounts our troops' adventures with elements of the 1st, 9th and 12th SS Panzer Divisions during this period. I intend to bring the 1/32 Typhoon I completed a few years back and a few other things reflecting Army, Navy and Air Force involvement.

Thank you Steve,  very interesting facts I was not aware of..

The Typhoon is one of my favorites, Can't wait to see it.

I myself will be bringing my Sherman III "Sherbrooke Fusiliers", my Japgdpather G, and Mustang III 315 Sqn - Polish, with invasion stripes.

I hope to see a number of club member collections.

For the Photogs amongst us, onsider bringing your cameras to capture what I hope will be a very fine display of work.

Joe

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